Animal Spirits Podcast - The World's Worst Investor (EP.111)

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

On this week's show we discuss the food delivery recession, demographic wars, why people are staying in their homes longer, why teens love TikTok, how Deadspin imploded, selling out at the top, Apple wearable growth, Ashton Kutcher's personal finance advice, The Irishman and much more. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. So, Ben, the moment of reckoning has arrived, the freezingest coltay you've ever given. So I saw the Irishman yesterday. And the bar was high.

It went even higher. It was absolutely every bit as good or in the same class as Goodfellas and Casino. Really? That good. That good. Because Goodfell is good. Good fellow's good. Good fellow's good. Okay. I'll take it. Like, every, the performances from the big three, De Niro, Pesci, and Puccino were ridiculous. Pesci still got it because he hasn't acted in like 10 years. It's like riding a bicycle. Harvey Kytel, there was a lot of cameos.

I don't want to spoil anything. But Matt Oskalo is excellent. He was actually pretty good. Yeah. So I think that that might be my last movie of 2019. How did it live up to crawl? It wasn't, well, it was even better than crawl. Actually, there's another movie, something about the knives.

I forget what the name of it. It looks good. But I also saw Terminator. over the weekend. And apparently not many other people did. So there's only been 39 of a man. Well, so this goes to like the, this is just beating a dead horse. And we'll get into the Scorsese thing in a minute. But I was thinking in terms of franchises, somebody made a good point. It's sort of like aliens. Like how many more can you do? But I have to say that this was, I have very low expectations. This was a very satisfying conclusion to the series.

I'm full. You're sure that was it? I mean, they made a lot of them. No, I'm not sure. Do you think the Irishman is going to be too long for some people? It was, I think the runtime is officially three hours, 48 minutes. See, I think that's good for Netflix. That's why you have it on Netflix if it's that long because you can start and stop it. Fair. I mean, I thought that I was very happy that I saw on the theater because I don't know how I would have sat down for this. I guess you just break it up.

Okay, not my greatest take in the world. I backtracked it after I read the book. I said it's going to be good. Yeah, I got nothing. It was, I tried. Well, last week I said, oh, you know what? let's actually stick with this for a second. Last week I said that it's sort of sometimes your initial reaction to a movie isn't your final reaction. And you had a problem with that.

What's your problem? That's why I said maybe I can't trust this take because it doesn't always stick on the first try. No, you never think a movie's great. And then like a year later you think it sucks. Maybe 20 years later it doesn't age well. But the opposite often happens where you don't enjoy it. And I was thinking about Anchorman. How is it possible that I didn't love that movie, which is obviously such an epically amazing, fantastic movie. Here's why. I really didn't like Brick, the character, Steve Carell's character. I didn't care for it.

Really? I love Lamb. None of his humor got me. And they end the movie with Brick went on to advise George W. Bush in his presidential campaign. And that was the last thing that you saw. And there's, I think Dan Gilbert wrote about this or somebody, how you only remember the beginning of something in the end of something. And I really don't think I like the ending. So perhaps that's why I watch.

out of it, not enjoying it. Okay. I guess I've never cared about the ending of a comedy, but... What does that mean? What does that even mean? You don't care about the ending of a comedy? No, because comedies always end kind of badly. Like, wedding crashers, terrible ending.

Yeah, terrible ending. Terrible ending. You're right. Hangover was actually a good ending. When they did the pictures at the end. Oh, fantastic ending. A lot of them don't, aren't always greatest, but... Okay. All right, I'm willing to admit it.

I was wrong. So what did... Credit to me. What did you think of the Scorsese piece? I told you last night I'm pretty sure I could have ghostwritten this one because this is exactly what I've been saying. Now, I understand why people are pushing back

because there's the difference between cinema and art and entertainment. Yeah, art. I mean, you have to have these entertaining like factions of things. Well, movies are entertaining and cinema is art. Here's my analogy. Because he said,

he said, there are sequels and name, but they are remakes and spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can't really be any other way. That's the nature of modern film franchises, market research, audience tested, vetted, modified, re-vetted, and remodivide until they're ready for consumption. Okay, boomer.

This is what happened to baseball, where analytics got in the way and now it's kind of boring. So there's only strikeouts and home runs, and it's like 12 pitchers a game, and it's basically a completely different game. Remember how Will Smith a few years ago talked about how he basically studied every, like, top five movie of all time? Oh, yeah. And he said, I'm going to make my movies just like this.

Right. And, like, you can take that too far. So you wonder if, like, the analytics thing got taken too far. And it's like, well, we're just giving people what they want. But you also have to have some other stuff. So I see both sides of this. But in general, I'm 70-30 in Scorsese's camp here, that there's just way too much of this remake stuff. And then people need to.

But the art stuff, I could never take myself seriously saying the word cinema. Well, you're not an artist. Or even film. Yeah. Well, I'm a hot take artist. So it's unlike us to read a shareholder. letter, but this Grubhub one was so explosive. Did you read it or you just read the clips? I read it. I actually read the whole letter. This is always a red flag. And again, not necessarily

our lane, but whenever a company says something like the addressable market, right? So they said, it is widely believed that the total market for takeout of the United States, including pickup and delivery, is greater than $200 billion annually. So what? And you're just going to get a piece of that? The surprising thing about this letter is, like, too long didn't read, is They basically said, this is not a great business. They're saying, we can overcome it, but it's not a great business to deliver food to people. And if I've learned one thing from Shark Tank, never talk about the addressable market. Isn't this one of those kind of like, yeah, duh?

Like food delivery can't is not the kind of business that you can scale. Well, let me ask you a question. Is this a yeah, duh, after the fact? Or was everybody's talking about this previously? I feel like people were onto this. Okay. I think you have to give some credit to the people that were saying, there's only so much venture capital you can throw out these businesses that don't have

like good growth prospects for the future. The business isn't doesn't make any sense. This is my favorite line. We believe online diners are becoming more promiscuous. Right. It's basically like it's hard for them to keep. There's no there's no potential mode. Like why would anybody be loyal to Grubhub or any of these companies? Right. There's no, there's no barriers. And they said Uber reported last night and they were down because they said they had some weakness at Uber Eats. I mean, I guess it makes sense. Like these business models seem to made for an era where we have driverless cars, basically, and maybe they're too early. And in 20 or 30 years, we look back and say, oh, they were just too early, just like

Pets.com. But it was refreshingly honest for them to basically say we are in a crappy business. And the company is off 80% from their all-time highs. It would think was down 40% that day. Yeah. So it's down 80%. Have you ever used them before? Yeah.

Okay. I mean, I've used food delivery before. Well, I believe does Grubbubble own seamless? I have no idea. But, yeah, I mean, it's just not a surprise, right? It shouldn't be. Okay, okay, boomer, thoughts. Hate it.

I'm over it. I hate it. I thought it was funny for like 10 minutes. All right, here's the thing. It's so easy to make generational divides and make it a punchline. And I just think, like, and now social media has latched onto it and it's just beating it to death. So, for instance, Yahoo Finance tweeted this, retirement expert, quote, stop taking pictures of your food and open a Roth IRA, which is just like so nauseating. I hate the division between young people

and old people. I feel like this has always been the way that old people are bitter towards young people because they're on the back nine and things are getting better always for the next generation and you didn't have to go through what I went through. But this is not new. I feel like this is sort of a permanent thing. And I went to a roundtable type dinner last week with your boy, Derek Thompson as a host. And very nice. He's your boy now. He lived up to expectations. And here's, I think, a point that is missing in all of this. And this is a very nuanced point. Young people aren't able to buy homes like their parents did and they're not getting married until later and all of that sort of stuff.

Is that really bad? Like, our parents' generation got married at 22. A lot of them got divorced at 30. My parents included. Got houses that were too big, had more kids than they could afford. There's tradeoffs here that maybe young people wouldn't take. So it's, so the thing is, like, people don't have that. option today, which is maybe the gripe. It's like, fine, if you want to put it off because

you can afford to, great. But I think there's a lot of responsibilities. Like, if I started my adult life at 23 years old with children, I would have been, it would have been really bad for my kids. Right. Yeah. It's sometimes the young generation has to. And Ricky Jervase tweeted this morning, he said, every generation calls the one before harsh and unalightened and the one after a fragile and naive. Nothing changes. You just move from one to the other thing to die. And I think social media is just amplifying this grossness. Here's my solution to this. Let's have a purge. So, you know the movie The Purge, where it's 24 hours, there's no laws. Let's just do a 24-hour social media purge.

All the young people can say all the crap they want about old people, get it off their chest. They don't know what they're talking about. They deny climate change, whatever. Get it out and then, like, be done of it. 24-hour purge, move out. This whole idea that our parents stole from us and left us in this horrible position. Like, I just don't buy that. I buy it a little.

I'm not going to lie. The baby boomers, they're not going to go out on in history as the greatest generation. All right, but whatever. But here's a thing. Let's say put us in their... Are we going to be such a great generation? No, but put us in their position and would it have been any different? No. Because you go with what you know at the time.

People are people. Yes. And that was just the situation that they were brought up in and this is our situation. Now, I will say, I saw the most okay boomer thing in the theater yesterday. So there was a person who went to the theater by himself. I respect that, as you know. However, he wouldn't stop doing the violent leg tap. Oh.

And it was giving me obvious. it up. But anyhow, he sat down, the boomer next to him, said, is there a Burger King around here? And he said, I don't know. And he said, would you mind taking out your phone? So the kid took out his phone and put Burger King into his Google Maps. It was very bizarre. I was dying to know why the guy wanted. Could you come to my house and fix my printer for me? I can't figure out of connect the Wi-Fi. It was pretty much one of those. So let's stick with this theme. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about people staying in their homes longer. Yes. And a lot of it had to do, I think, with Baby Boomer.

this one kind of surprised me. So they said homeowners nationwide are remaining in their homes typically 13 years, five years longer than they did in 2010, according to Redfin. So owners aren't trading up. And then now here's like the downside. I think this is a really good thing because I've written in the past about the fact that trading up in your house, there's a ton of frictions there. It's expensive. It's expensive. And you kind of lose out on some of the gains of having a long-term ownership thing. So that's as good. And of course, there's always like another side of it. And they're saying, well, when they're not downsizing or upsizing, it's harder for younger people. people to come in and find homes because now that means a supply and the inventory is down. So it's

harder for people to buy homes. It's like, I guess you can't win. So when one person does something good and long term, another person is hurt. But this is a good. I was surprised it's this long. And they looked at 55 metro areas for this study. And they said homeowners are staying longer in every single one of them. Economists say aging baby winners are the biggest culprits because many are staying healthier later in life and choosing not to downsize. And don't you think maybe part of this is the fact that since real estate bottom in 2012-ish that people want to stay because their housing prices are going up instead of sort of trading around when they're down or they're being forced out.

Maybe. I think people like staying in their home. I mean, yeah. But I mean, if you're in a big metro area like San Francisco that is just going bananas with their housing prices, don't you think that you would always say, like, I'm just going to wait longer and keep seeing it going up? And then maybe if housing prices do fall. You know, you ask me a lot of leading questions.

You say, don't you think a lot? I believe that's called a rhetorical question. in this game. So teens love TikTok. Again, definitely an age thing going on in the current zeitgeist. So teens love TikTok. Silicon Valley is trying to stage an intervention. This is pretty, these numbers are pretty wild. Over the past 12 months, TikTok has been downloaded 750 million times compared with 750 million times for Facebook, 450 million times for Instagram, YouTube is 300 million and 275 million for Snapchat. So Facebook tried to come in and copy them. And the, you The kids weren't having it.

Wait, I never heard of this. They called it lasso. Yeah, that app only got 500,000 downloads. Mostly in Mexico. Okay, I'll probably be the last person on Earth to join TikTok, but if that's what people want, that's what we'll give them. But I don't, I, this is my okay boomer one, I guess. Yeah.

Because I don't, why, I mean, what's the difference between putting a video on TikTok and putting a video on Twitter? The audience. Okay. That must be the thing. sure that there's probably like cool effects that you can do. Okay. Yeah, I'm never the first one on these things, as I said before, so, but it's cool. So is Deadspin gone? Did you ever read Deadspin before? Not really. I followed them on Twitter, but I don't think I ever read an article.

I saw, like, I saw the memes and I was peripherally familiar with them, but I wasn't a reader. It seems like one of the, I never read them because I only have so much internet bandwidth to pay attention to stuff. And I guess the idea is they had some new people, new owners come in and said, stick to sports. And I feel like if you're, and everyone is now quit from there, so I think it's pretty much gone, this new media website. It sounds like they basically wanted them to quit, because otherwise why would they do this? But if you're not ESPN or... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't think that's a case. Why would, they had to know that something like this would happen? You don't think so? No. That they just wanted to kill them.

Why wouldn't they just fire everybody and shut it down? Why would they buy a business and then want everybody to quit? That doesn't make any sense. Conspiracy theory, Peter Thiel really owns them, and he wanted to shut them down like Gawker. Wasn't they spun out from Gawker? I think it was part of it and a lot of people were there Again, I never read it But unless your ESPN or Sports Illustrated You can't really say stick to sports

Like those are the only places That you could really make the case Where sticking to sports Probably makes sense Everywhere else You have to invite culture Or personal stories or experiences Well nobody wants to be told what to do

It's like the man's stepping on your throat I hate stick to I hate when people say Stick to Finance, stick to politics And don't you think that the sports And pop culture stuff is just so intertwined These days That it's hard to separate the two

Well, I was just one further point on that. I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment. But, like, if somebody says something that you don't like, just move on. Unfollow them. Like, why don't you have people to be such dicks and say, like, stick to? Right. Yes. Just don't pay attention to. On the flip side, Barstool, exploring a sale. So last year, I think the support and I sold some of his shares at $100 million valuation. It is interesting how they have gone completely separate ways. Considering they were similar website types. And I think Barstool was just more shit posting. Right. And they obviously maybe just have a stronger brand or they figure out the business economics behind it. Do you think that Barstool today could exist with the same sort of content in 15 years? Is this like, is it the same people now, would they be fans 15 years later?

Or is there always a young group of 20-25-year-old bros? I think there's always going to be college people that will maybe. But the growth that they've seen, I don't blame them for trying to sell them. out. So there's a local brewery in Grand Rapids founders as like one of the top ten breweries in the country now. And the whole idea before when they were coming up was brood in Michigan, owned by people from Michigan, blah, blah, blah. It was like this whole local thing. And now they've exploded and gotten bigger. And a few years ago, they sold like 30% of the company to this brewer in Spain. And now they recently just sold another 60%. So they only hold 10%. And some of the people in

the area were kind of pissed because, well, you had this local stuff. But I'm like, you know what? The brewery thing has been so huge, I don't blame them for taking some off. And I think this is kind of a similar scenario where it's like, if you've seen such huge growth, take something money off the table. Because who knows, maybe you're right. Maybe the audience are more fickle these days, even though it seems like they have a strong fan base. AirPods. Are you considering getting the new ones?

No, unless I'd lose my other ones. Okay. So I'm going to pivot to the new ones because Robin is going to take my pair. Okay. So. Do you think that the noise canceling option is really that important? Yes. And I never really thought about it until...

Well, it has to be here because I'm in New York now. We're doing this face-to-face. In Michigan, things are pretty quiet in the morning. I get off the plane here. So I'm walking down the 6th Avenue, and there's like... And I was listening to the Bill Simmons podcast, and it was hard to hear. But I was just blown away by this, that Apple's wearables did $25 billion in their latest fiscal year, which is as much revenue as Macy's.

And you had a great dunk on me. Kudos to you. You missed the tweet. I missed the tweet. But isn't that wild? Yeah. So it's their whole... You thought it was just AirPods, but it's their whole wearables thing.

I am really shocked to how much I love my AirPods and my Apple watch. I never would have expected it. I use those on a daily basis. And I'm, unless someone else comes up with like a bundle to sell you, the phone, the AirPods, and the watch altogether, somehow, like, I'm tethered to Apple now forever with this stuff, basically, right? And don't you, I mean. Caught you. What? Don't you.

Don't you think, what are you about to say? You're leading the witness. go ahead this is called podcasting I don't know where my thought was oh isn't it the noise cancelling AirPods isn't it kind of nice

that it's basically like a personal do not disturb for your face like don't talk to me leave me alone you know what I've noticed when you go to a counter Tripoli for example

and you order with your AirPods in I will admit it is quite rude but the person behind the counter always pretends like they can't hear you and I feel like

I would do that too if I was buying the counter. I would totally be like, what was that? Yeah, that's true. It's a dick move to a dick move because it's pretty rude. And I should stop doing that. Okay. So Ashton Coucher, Kelso from that 70s show, is going to put out a reality show to help people pay off their student loans.

Which sounds interesting. It's called Going From Broke. Wait, it does? I don't, don't you think it's kind of good that someone is trying to like help in the personal finance realm? No, I don't think that. Okay. Here's the, I don't know, I've never heard of this before. the 10 episode series will stream on chicken soup for the soul entertainment and Sony Corp's

crackle service. I like chicken soup for the soul. This is a big chicken soup for the soul guy. Okay. I got to be honest. I've never heard of crackle before. Me either. And the streaming wars. That's like crackle, that's like New Zealand entering World War II or something. Like, what? But here's my problem with this. And our colleague Nick asked a question on, like, would you be willing to accept personal finance advice from someone like Ashton Coochor? And to give him credit, for all that stuff I've read, he's a pretty good, like, businessman and venture investor. But don't you think personal finance advice from Uber successful and rich people is almost never good? Well, there's a chicken and egg thing.

Like, you should skip college and just start your own business or... 100% of rich people say they were never driven by money. And it's so nauseated and exhausting. Follow your passion. Yeah, I hear you completely. But people without means aren't going to give financial advice because they aren't. successful with money, which sounds pretty harsh to say. So I do agree that it's like, all right, enough rich person telling me what I should do with my student debt and stuff like that.

But where else is the advice going to come from? True. Someone who had student debt and paid it off or something. I don't know. That's what all those blogs are. But that was just my thought. Okay. Good question from Jason Swag from the Wall Street Journal. This is a very good question. Don't you think? Don't you think this is a good question? Who is the world's worst investor and how can we tell? This hurt my brain a little bit. I think everyone in their life knows someone who is the world to worst investor. It's a co-worker, an uncle, a brother, a friend. Everyone has that person.

A co-host, a blog co-host? Yes. A former trader who kept a journal. Actually, hold on. While we're on that, so I opened up my DMs per your suggestion, and I've got in a bunch of really bad ones, and I think I'm to close it up. The final straw was this morning, hi, sir. Can I have you a few minutes, need to discuss with you about my trading. setup. That person must be really desperate if they want to talk with you about trade setups.

Oh, man. I think if you tried to like pinpoint the world's worst professional investor, you could probably figure out a way to do it. There's a certain member of Fintuit who writes a weekly blog that probably fits that profile. But again, I think everyone knows that worst investor in their life, right? You have to have that person who is just terrible with their finances. All right. But what would you say, do you have an answer to his question? How can we tell? How can you tell? I think any time that there is some sort of, like during the housing crisis, there was, in the mortgage meltdown stuff, we have a family friend who dove headlong into that stuff and was buying houses and got over leveraged. And it's kind of like, they're the person

that dives into those fads every time. And you know when there's a fad that's going to blow up, you know that person is going to be there. But I think Jason's talking about professional investors. I don't know. That's what I read out of this. I'm not sure if that's what he was going for. It's a pretty open-ended question. So, okay, well, what is your dad? I don't know. I mean, you could go with most billions of dollars lost. But like, let's just say that LTCM had the most spectacular fall from grace. There's no way that they're the worst investors ever. Maybe the most overconfident investors ever. You could say the, I mean, I don't know. This is very tricky. It's also, but it's interesting because if you invert this, you could say, like, who's the world's best investor on that? You could have a legitimate argument around. But again, it's hard to separate the people that got lucky from people that were very, very good. Same thing here. It's hard. How do you know that LTCM, if that Russian thing never happened, what's a counterfactual? Would they have been Renaissance technology? Well, so they talked about them in that book, and we're going to talk to the author about it. That should be on the show in the coming weeks. And one of the

quotes that stuck with me was they said, LTCM thought that their models were reality, and we never did. And so they were. They were more self-aware. Yeah, so long-term capital management wasn't self-aware. Maybe there might be a case to be made that they were the smartest, dumbest investors ever because they were so overconfident that they figured out the world. So there was a video making the rounds this week about some poor kid, it looks like a kid, on Robin Hood who... You missed your calling. So these people now film themselves making these huge option trades. So this is some guy who filmed like his trading account. He's buying

puts on Apple. It looked like after earnings. And he had like a $60,000 position and it basically went to zero. He thought Apple go down. But did we show, Did they show how much equity he had, like, what amount of that $57,000 was leverage, was margin? I have. And so how does he pay that? And how did Robin Hood allow that? I don't. But I'm saying, this could have been your, this was your calling in 2012 when you were a traitor.

I was never. You could have done the yolo every time. I was never even close to that reckless. I was doing similar stuff, but on a microcosm of that. I mean, betting on, betting huge options into an earnings release. That's just red or black at the casino. That's like desperate. You owe somebody $50,000 and you're either doubling, you're just doubling down.

Okay. New survey. How realistic would it be for you to say 50% of your take-home pay in order to retire early? This is the fire stuff. 54% said impossible. 41% said difficult, not impossible. 1% said easy. 1% said already done it.

Okay. I think the impossible one is actually low here. So low. What do you think that should be? 54% said it's impossible. I think that should be way higher. 98%. Right.

that seems, I was kind of surprised. Maybe 99% because outside the 1%, like, people spend what they make. Right. People who are in a bad financial position. Some of the people do make poor choices. A lot of people are just paying for the necessities and there's literally nothing left over. Right. There's nothing for them to do.

So it would be impossible unless they just gave up on living their life. Did you see this, there was a study done showing that a single anonymous market manipulator caused Bitcoin to go to $20,000? How did that happen? I don't know. Over my head. Any thoughts here? I'm not shocked. Like, some of the volatility you see in that, just a couple weeks ago, was it up 20% and down 20% in like the same couple of days? That was amazing. It went from like 9,000 to 6,000 back to 9,000 within the course of 36 hours. I mean, if you had some heft in that space, every once in a while, wouldn't you test it out and see, like, how much can I push this thing around? I'm sure. Would you? People have, I don't, why not? I'd try it. It's still such a young, like, immature marketplace.

So there were stories about like stable coins and how that affected stuff. I just think that this is, I have no idea what Bitcoin is still. Like, there was a really good podcast that Patrick had somebody on two weeks ago. And he was talking about the early days. I think he bought Bitcoin at like three cents and sold it at $10 or whatever the numbers were. And talking about blockchain and technologies. And I just still don't get it. It's a digital ledger. I'm surprised with all the money that surely floated into that space during the bubble, that there hasn't been something that's come out of it yet, that you could... I think people would argue that a lot has come out of it. But something for everyday people. Yeah, something that is tangible that you can say like, oh, that's a use for it. That makes sense. I'm surprised we haven't seen anything like that yet.

So I was paying my taxes to the state of California and I logged on. They sent me a week later a pin, okay, on paper. They mailed me a pin on paper. I went back to log on, and I couldn't log back on. Like, how inefficient is that? If that isn't ripe for blockchain disruption, I don't know what is. Why are you paying taxes in California? Don't worry about it.

Okay. So there was an article in institutional investor. Investors paid more than $105 billion in fees to underperforming large-cap managers in the last 10 years as of the end of 2018. my response is so what like that's obviously a huge huge huge number but were they ripped off I mean did they not know the fees that they were paying and did they not have the potential to outperform like to me this is hindsight bias written all over it I think that this is sort of a load of nonsense you've been being the contrarian on the active management stuff lately well because I think it's too I think it's gone too far too far like so what I just I get it

It's a really big number. I guess it's hard to put that into perspective if you don't know what the asset management are. How about this? How about this? Let's say that investors paid $110 billion to managers that outperformed and netted them $700 billion in outperformance. You would never see that.

You're really angry about this one. I am. I don't like this. Okay. But I mean... And I don't even like the ideas of zero and 30. I think not that it is necessarily has behavioral ramifications, but how does somebody pay the bills with a 0% manager?

I'm guessing it's got to be someone who already has a decent amount of money. How big is the fund that's doing this? And over what period of time? It's hard to lay out that groundwork for, yeah. I just don't like it. Quarterly, annually. And I think that the market is voting with assets moving. That's the point. These fee numbers will be going down for the foreseeable future. I guess I'm very libertarian when it comes to this sort of thing. I think that the market should decide. And it is. And I guess the other thing is that the markets have gone up. So those fee values are always going to go up to even if the expense ratios are going down because markets have been doing markets have quadruples and markets never go down we know this to be true pretty much

by the way we got dunked on somebody dunked on us because we we said that a great depression might not happen again yes we're obviously we don't understand how things work now and we're too young i'm pretty sure we said it might not happen again something along those lines but are you are you 100% sure that a great depression will never happen again i would never say i'm 100% sure about anything in the markets there we go settled yeah i wrote a i wrote a follow-up piece on that saying like I think like a great depression right now is already happening market wise in Greece. I didn't realize like the Greek stock market from the highs in 2007 is down like 97%. How many stocks are in that index? Did you look into that? Yeah, it was 32 and like 65% in the top

10. So my point was maybe the U.S. is more mature and diverse and it'd be tough for that to happen, but it could certainly happen elsewhere in more emerging economies or. I got Greek food the other day, as I often do. And I know this is a thing, but I'm always sort of stunned. when I hear it. Yoro? How do you say it? You say Yero? No, like gyro.

Gyro? You say Yero? I don't get it. Why would it be a silent G? I've heard that before. I don't know. If the G is silent, why isn't it just Iro or Wiro? Like, Eero?

I don't get it. I don't think I can take your food recommendations anymore. Why? Because you got dunked on big time. Oh, from my dried bananas? By a reader. That was a great email. Someone emailed and said,

terrible recommendation. I bought some today. And it is just intensified banana flavor in a chewy fruit leather type package. The only thing worse than dried fruits is the freeze dried fruits my kids love. So, yeah. Wait, do you say Euro?

I don't know if I don't like those, so I guess I don't get them, so I don't. Well, why are you confused? What do you say? I guess I'd probably say gyro. Okay. Yeah. I'm not a silent G type of guy.

I just, I don't get it. Somebody asked us, why can't Twitter make any money? Have you been seeing all the promoted tweets in your stream? Yeah, they finally came. Okay. You mentioned it. So now it's, for me, it's RIA in a box. It's State Street and it's I share.

constantly. Right. So someone said, why isn't Twitter making more money without delving into like the finances of it, it seems like for whatever reason they haven't figured out the advertising platform as well as some like Facebook has. My solution to this is simple. If people say, well, we should charge power users or charge people to follow a certain amount of people, hire whoever is running Instagram's ads and put them on Twitter. It's because it's the same. Instagram ads get me every single time. They may not. I'm not. I don't. I, know me. I'm shopping a lot on Instagram now. It's great, right? I just got a pair of boots there the other day. I got a pair of shoes. You, and you had your USA basketball shirt on last week.

I made fun of you for it. And then this morning, I get a USA basketball. Is that where you got it, though? Yeah, you know what I also bought an NBA jam sweatshirt? Have you seen that yet? No. Not bad. So I don't, did you, did you care at all that Twitter did the banning political ad stuff? I've never seen that on Twitter before. Honestly, I don't know. I thought it was just, an unbelievable sub-tweet from Jack Dorsey to Mark Zuckerberg. Yes. Right? That was just,

that was a whole reason for it, right? Like, you've taken some shots at us in the past that saying we're a clown car. And so I, because it sounds to me like it, it was a rounding error in Twitter's revenue. Was this virtue signaling? Because there was not a lot of money.

Yeah, it didn't matter at all. By the way, are all tweets virtual signals technically? I don't know. Are you asking me a leading question? Are they digital signals? Oh. I mean, but that,

that was my favorite part of it. It's just like tech people taking some shots at each other. I enjoyed that, that part of it. Recommendations, can I go? Yes. You have anything else? I just can't believe you sat at the Irishman for four hours. Did you get up once?

No. That's pretty impressive. It was long. I probably got up like three times. Okay. There is nothing like hardcore history. Nothing like it. He is, Dan Carlin, is so impressive.

So he just released his latest one talking about, it was based on World War II and Asia specifically. I could never get into the first two of those. it didn't click with me. These, maybe these weren't the best, but I was just blown. He's amazing. I was blown away. I just think it. I mean, I can't say enough good things about it.

I made the comment in the past. If we would have had those when I was in middle school or high school, I would have been such a bigger fan of history. I don't know how he does it. He was on Tim Ferriss years ago saying how it's not scripted. And he has notes all over the place. I don't know how he does it. I would love to be a fly on the wall.

So Bill Simmons is out with the book of basketball 2.0, which we both listened to this morning. The opening, I guess he called it the prologue was so freaking good. I sort of got chills at the end. And when I say sort of, I did. And you forget how good of a writer he is because he doesn't write it anymore. But I am all here for this. The second episode was a sit down with Steve Kerr. The third is a chat with Ryan Rusillo about how Steph Curry changed the game. If you're a basketball fan, this is definitely must. I'm all in for the podcast book thing. All in. It's great because you can kind of mix in writing with interviews, with opinions.

It works really well. One last thing that I didn't imagine earlier. I said that Terminator is in the same van as aliens. I'd also throw Jurassic Park in there. Like, I am huge fans of all that series, but I feel like I've gotten enough. Like the next Jurassic Park, in my opinion, could be the last one. Yeah. The reboot was good, and then it's like walk away from the reboot.

Once they make money, they have to keep doing it because, that tested out. Okay. We've been watching Modern Love on Amazon Prime. Okay. Let's talk. Did you try it yet? I did. Okay. It's kind of, so it's eight episodes. Each of them is like their own little half-hour movie, I guess. It's almost like a half-hour rom-com. It's kind of like chicken soup for the soul. Okay. Do you like them? So it's with each one has a different story and it's different actors and actresses. I really like the one with Dev Patel. Yeah, DeV Patel. And Andy Garcia. Ann Hathaway. Tina Faye. I'm saying some of the actors.

There's an actresses in these. So there's a lot of big names, and they each have, like, their own half hour. It's basically, like, taking a rom-com and shortening it into a half-hour, and each one is at stand-in-its-one. That I kind of like, because it's kind of a show, it's kind of a throwaway show where you don't have to think very much. And so if you, like... What do you think of the Anna-Hathaway episode?

That one was a little bizarre. Because I was watching my own. I was like, oh, these make you feel pretty good. Yeah. And then that one didn't make feel good ones, yeah. Like, the very first one was, like, a feel-good romantic comedy. And I feel like there's kind of a hole in romantic comedy. comedies these days. Not that I'm a big rom-com fan, but every once in a while, you kind of need one of

those just to, like, shut off the brain and not have something so serious. I'm a fan. You know, I never saw The Devil Wars Prada. I don't think it's a rom-com, but just saying. Because Anne Hathaway kind of went into- You never saw the devil. I like it. She went into hiding. Or maybe that's not the right word, but hibernation. It's been a while. Yeah. I think that's because the internet canceled her for no reason. Why? For being annoying? Pretty much. Fair. Harsh but fair. Okay. So, last week I talked about how I was going to do my Ben's list of fiction, private eye detective books.

I thought long and hard about this one. And one of our readers or listeners who was actually the guy, the gentleman at this conference who came up and gave me a handwritten note with some of his recommendations. That was awesome.

He tried to help me a little bit, but I'm keeping this on my own. I'm not taking any input for this one. So I've got different, so I've got a handful of ones that I love. So I'm going to go through by category here. So because there's different... Just go.

Okay. So the best wise guy, as in like best one-liner's funniest, Spencer by Robert Parker, which is just an all-timer, started in like the late 70s, went through, he passed away in the 2000s, just an all-timer, like 200-page books, makes you laugh out loud in some of them. Biggest badass by far is Reacher by Lee Child. Tom Cruise. Turned him into Tom Cruise. It should have been Chris Hemsworth, probably, someone like that, to play him in the movie, not Tom Cruise, as much as they like T.C.

Best character development is by far the Joe Pickett series by CJ Box. By the way, this has an audience of like two people. What's that? Yeah. Hey, I've gotten a few emails on this. Best procedural crime is Harry Bosch by Michael, Michael Connolly. One more. Best storytelling is the Lucas Davenport, Virgil Flour, but John Sanford. Someone said, pick one. Okay, all of all these, I would probably, if you're going to start from first book to the last book, it would be Joe Pickett series by C.J. Box. If you're just going to pick a book at random, it would be the Ritcher series. Okay. Can I just say one more thing? That was one. Ben's fiction hierarchy. Thank you for that. I do want to get into some of these because they look like a good time. So it's taking me like three weeks, maybe even four at this point to read a short history of nearly everything. I don't know that's a good for rekindled. It's too much science.

Okay. It's been a while. I put it in the backburn because I just finished. It's taking me a while. I just finished the man who solved the markets by Greg Zuckerman about Jim Simons. And I'm going to save some of my thoughts because we're going to do a sit down with him. And then I want to share some more own thoughts on that too for a little intro because it was one of the most interesting investing books I've read in a long time.

That's all I'm going to say at this point. But it was, it's definitely worth reading. If you are one of these people who likes the history of the markets are learning about the best investors ever, and the takeaways are nothing like you get when you read like a Warren Buffett book or Charlie Munger or whoever. So that book was... Yeah, it doesn't make you think that you'd go out and replicate that. It was very well done.

I highly recommend it for any one who considers themselves a market historian or anything like that. All right. Good seeing you. Good. Yes. Good see you. We made it in person.

We're going to film how many different podcasts when I tape on the New York. We have a bunch. No spoilers. We've got a bunch of talking books coming. Some people in the financial Twitter. Authors, coaches, all this stuff. We're going to do a lot of different podcasts in the coming week. So expect to see a bunch more stuff for us.

Yes. I'm going to interview you and you're going to interview me as influencers. So send us an email, Animal SpiritsPod at gmail.com. And we will talk to you next week.